Enter Colin Ferguson of Perthshire in Scotland who seems to be the embodiment of a Net Zero politician’s dream. He’s done it all with a ground-up rebuild of his detached house, incidentally just the sort of project that 99% of the British population couldn’t possibly afford:
The renovation, for which Mr Ferguson, now 74, was involved in the labour, was completed in 2013. An energy assessor assigned a perfect efficiency score of 100, placing it in a band typically reserved for new builds. On the certificate, seen by the Telegraph, under suggested “cost-effective improvements” it simply read: “not applicable”.
Then Mr Ferguson installed a heat pump – and his perfect energy rating went up in smoke.
It seems Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) have a nasty habit of going out of date:
The retired insurance claims manager and his wife, Sue, had wanted to replace their oil-fired boiler with a heat pump, using £9,500 worth of Government funding. This would require obtaining a new energy performance certificate (EPC) after the heat pump was installed, as their previous one was due to expire.
Not only that, the new one can downgrade the house:
The certificates have been criticised in the past for their inconsistency. Assessors often rely on guesswork to work out a property’s efficiency level, and some have been known to wrongly estimate a property’s floor area by tens of square metres. Heat pumps, while greener, can often incur households higher bills. In some cases they have hurt rather than help a home’s EPC score, as the certificates currently reward lower bills over carbon emissions.
“What really annoyed me was the little man who came in an Audi A8 to do the assessment,” Mr Ferguson recalls. “In he waltzed. I had all the documentation from the original build – reams of stuff – and he took one look at it and said, ‘I don’t need any of that’. Had it not been for the fact we’d applied for a grant to put a heat pump in he’d have been out the door.”
Incredulously [the Telegraph probably means ‘Incredibly’ here], Mr Ferguson’s new EPC assessment had fallen to 74, placing it in the C band. The total floor area of the house also appeared to shrink between assessments – from 331 square metres to 279, the equivalent of three large bedrooms.
This can have a drastic impact on the house’s value, regardless of the house’s efficiency....<<<Read More>>>...